My Love

by Sabrina Zbasnik

  "Ah," Alistair nodded, catching on, "never thought of that, but it could have happened. Fate's a funny thing when you play that what if game." Folding his hands up around the naked potato, he held it cradled in the crook of his arm like a baby instead of a vegetable. "First time I met Lanny she, uh, caught me in an argument with a mage. I didn't start it but they got wind of my having been a templar and, oh boy, do mages like to start fights."

  "It was one of their top five favorite ways to pass time," Cullen said.

  Alistair snickered and nodded, "I'd believe it. She steps up to greet me and I ask her point blank if she's a mage. The color drains from her face, well, not all of it, that would have been terrifying to see. But, you know. Anyway, she asks why I wondered about her magehood and I tell her that I like to know my chances of getting turned into a toad. Then she does that Lanny smile, that quirk of her lips where just half of it lifts and you know she's about to start something on fire." He paused in his re-telling to lift his chest up higher. With his voice pressed out of his nose, he said, "'Well, I do happen to be a mage, but I won't turn you into a toad. They're overrated. I prefer something exotic like a parrot or anteater.' Anteater? Why an anteater? 'I think they're fun.' That. That was the moment I knew I was done for. She could have yelled at me same as that other mage, or sighed in exasperation and stomped off. At least cursed a bit at being saddled with me, but no...that anteater."

  Tears watered at the edge of his eyes, the memory overwhelming him as he rocked on his wobbly stool. Alistair kept a tighter hold on the potato while staring back through time, back to when Lana was alive and also his. Blinking away the tears, the king's voice slipped out of its wounded cadence and into his normal effervescent self. "What about you? How'd you meet Lanny?"

  "In the tower," Cullen said curtly.

  "No, here I assumed she swooped in on her chimera she borrowed from one of the gnomes living in Nevarra to rescue you from a dragon nest. If you don't want to talk, you don't..."

  "I first noticed Lana when," Cullen breathed deeply, his own memories washing over him. "She didn't speak to me, I doubt she even noticed me. Mages didn't see the templars."

  "Wallpaper," Alistair interrupted. "You're big, metal wallpaper. Sorry, sorry, go on with your story."

  "She was running from one class to another, and she paused at the doorframe I stood beside, dropped all her books, and suddenly had to rearrange them."

  That drew a hearty laugh from the king, "Maker, she was always doing that. 'No, no, this has to go after that' because whatever reasons were inside her head at the time. Save anyone that messed up her books. Whew."

  "There was an apprentice once who tried to throw her off. When her back was turned, he rotated around a pair of books nearly the same size and color of binding. No one thought she'd notice, but the moment she lifted them up a cross look broke upon her face."

  "Did she let him live?" Alistair asked, getting a nod from Cullen. "She was nicer in the tower. I bet Oghren still limps when it rains. I never understood her system. No, I rarely understood anything she said, but she'd give you this look like 'it's so simple a child can understand it' when you're pretty sure she made up a half dozen words to explain it."

  "And the crumbs in her pockets," Cullen smiled from the memory he nearly forgot. "The tranquil would find all manner of dangerous things leftover in mage pockets and pouches while doing the laundry -- to the point they kept a templar or two on hand in case of danger. Lana never had anything that could explode, but there were regularly half eaten biscuits, crackers, once a slice of cake."

  The king's laughs echoed with his own as they stared back through time. "During the blight, when we were all more or less homeless she kept leaving signs behind. Not wards, I could recognize those well enough. But after picking up her tent, she'd draw a marker in the dirt as if needing to tell the stars she'd been there. I always wondered why but I never," his head dropped down and he stared through the potato, "I never took the time to ask her." As if realizing he had a peeled potato in his lap, Alistair dropped the spud in the bucket and pinched the top of his nose. The move was enough to revive him and an ornery smile twisted up his lips, "She was a terrible blanket hog. You'd have to nail the damn thing down to stop her."

  "I know," Cullen said. The pain dropped in his gut from the memory of discovering it. He'd watched her small body rolled up in their only heat source for far longer than he should have, the cold biting into his exposed skin. But Cullen couldn't stop smiling at the tender calm enveloped around her courtesy of sleep wiping away the strain upon her face. She slumbered so peacefully, so beautifully, it was as if nothing of the past ten years hurt her. He'd yearned to kiss her in that moment, but he needed her blessing first, so she had to rise.

  Awkwardness burned between them as Cullen glared at his hands. Alistair whipped his head up and a strain of guilt etched through those Therin features, "And there goes our moment of bonding."

  "It...it is a fact," Cullen danced around stating that they'd both been intimate with her, "but it is best if we pretend it isn't." It was as diplomatic as he felt he could be, extending a potential olive branch to the king.

  Of course Alistair couldn't help himself, "So no trading tips, then?" Cullen glared which got a small chuckle from the king. "You wouldn't want them anyway, trust me."

  "I believe that is the first thing you've said I can whole heartedly endorse," Cullen responded, a hint of a smile lifting his dour lips.

  "She mentioned you once, well, said there was a templar. Didn't drop any names but I figured it out in retrospect."

  "Oh?" Cullen grimaced. It must have been after they liberated Kinloch. Whatever she had to say about him could not have been kind, and for good reason.

  "Lanny kept on about wanting to help in Kirkwall. Needing to assist the people and I didn't get why."

  Kirkwall? Her journal alluded to the wish of hers in visiting the city but he'd never thought she'd take it as far as petitioning the crown. Cullen twisted on the barrel, a mix of shame and pride curling in his stomach.

  Alistair yanked up one of his peeled potatoes and jabbed the knife into it. "She'd kept out of mage politics and for good reason. If the chantry bastards got any wind of her involvement they'd leap on her, taking down everyone else with 'em." Then the king took a soft bite out of the potato's white, uncooked flesh. Cullen sneered in response to his culinary travesty, but the man didn't notice as he took another bite. "Suddenly, Kirkwall goes explodey and she cares. Maybe she cared before, she just couldn't afford to look like she did. Lanny had a habit of burying all her wants deep inside so no one would see them. Damn near tried every trick at her disposal to get me to agree to let her go, but I wouldn't. A mage walking in Kirkwall after that happened? They'd have strung her up on the spot."

  He was right. Even if Cullen would have fallen on his knees to beg for her forgiveness while beyond grateful to see her again, it wasn't wise for the great mage of Ferelden to visit. Cullen himself might have tried to send her away for fear of what the people would do to her. In those months after the attack he had almost no control of anything, not the people, not the templars, not even himself.

  "I think she knew it was dangerous, probably why she asked me. It wasn't as if she had to, or ever ran any of her other death defying missions past me. But this one, some part of her wanted to be in Kirkwall and it pissed her off to no end that she knew she shouldn't be." He twisted about the half bitten potato on the end of the knife, his finger running along the toothmarks.

  "I'm sorry," Cullen said and he meant it. Not to Alistair, but to Lana. He had assumed she'd gotten wind of Kirkwall and felt nothing but contempt for the templars or for him after he allowed Meredith's rampage. Cullen never once thought to try to contact her for fear of what he'd get in return. He was too much of a coward to face up to that failure.

  But the king didn't snicker, didn't wave his potato like some scepter, or even raise his voice. He scrunched his head deep into his chest, his neck almost vanishing, "Du
ty. All that honor stuff that got drilled into our heads growing up. You owe the world this because when you were ten someone sold you to the chantry. Or because this is the only path you can take to keep from starving in the street. Because your father had a fascination with chambermaids. I..." As if realizing he was eating a raw potato, Alistair yanked the vegetable off his blade and tossed it into the scrap pile. He knocked his fist against the potato barrel in an arrhythmic solo. "The queen is pregnant. No one's supposed to know, not until it's whatever babies do in the womb. That quick kick thing."

  Cullen started at the news, "Pregnant? Why are you not with her? Your wife?" He added the last part as if afraid Alistair forgot.

  "Well, she did yell at me to get as far away from her as possible. You ever try to argue with a pregnant woman? It's a wonder I have a face left. I figured the Anderfells was distant enough," Alistair sighed, "at least until the little sire's out."

  "But this is the birth of your child. You should be there," Cullen harped on the nonchalant man peeling potatoes half way around the world from his family, but the king only rolled an eye at him and snickered.

  "Who said the kid was mine?"

  Cullen almost fell off his perch from the soft way the king of Ferelden landed that personal heartbreak upon him. "How can you be certain of that?"

  That got him a sigh and Alistair ran his hands through his hair. "There are a couple things that need to, well one thing for certain that needs to happen for that baby making stuff to work. Which we've both been more than happy to mutually forgo in this most holy of unions. But even then, it's damn certain seeing as how I'm a..." He threw off whatever he was going to say, a look of guilt crossing his face, "It's not my place to tell you about that and all, so, uh reasons."

  The king waved his hand through the air as if that would waft away the personal and also nearly treasonous secret he unloaded on this man he barely knew. But Cullen understood that the meat of the matter had nothing to do with his wife being adulterous and a simple matter of what he was, what Lana was. "She told me. About grey wardens and...I wasn't certain if it affected everyone."

  "Maker, thanks for that. Last I needed was Lanny back from the dead whipping my ass for giving away that problem," Alistair sighed. "It gets us all after a time. The no kids thing. I didn't learn about it until a few months after I joined, and Lanny..." He leaned further back on his stool until the back of his head collided with the barrel behind him. Bashing it a few more times, he paused and looked over at Cullen, "I don't know if children is one of your breaking points but please don't hurt her over it."

  After she told him, by the harsh light of morning, he'd thought about it, weighed the full severity of her confession. No children of his own seemed a high price but not if it meant losing Lana. She would win over some imaginary future he'd never before pictured for himself every time. "It is not," Cullen said.

  "Good, good," Alistair bobbed his head while staring up at the ceiling. "You aren't noble or anything either, right?"

  "No," Cullen curtly bit back, but Alistair sighed in relief. "My family are farmers."

  "Farmers...? Maker, could you imagine Lanny unleashed on a herd of goats?"

  Cullen had no idea what made that funny, but the king couldn't stop giggling at some mental image involving Lana and goats. Perhaps something humorous had happened to her during their blight days involving farm animals, or when she was an Arlessa. It struck him again that this man, the one who'd broken Lana's heart twice over, driven her to court death in the deep roads, knew far more about her than Cullen ever did. He'd watched from afar, getting only brief moments of her life, but Alistair had a decade of a friendship. Sometimes the Maker was particularly cruel.

  Rising up, the king reached for another potato. "I probably shouldn't have told you about the baby thing. They wanted to wait to make sure it took and then have a fancy party to tell all the other countries that Ferelden's throne was secure, so no measuring for curtains there Orlais."

  "While you're on the other side of thedas?" Cullen prompted.

  "I may have left before telling some of my advisers about this trip. Like, all of them. There was so much to get ready it slipped past me. I needed to send a message to Isabela, and there's the packing. No matter how early you pack, you always forget something."

  Cullen took the time to ask for permission to leave, but the king of Ferelden up and vanished from his own kingdom without so much as a note, all to find the woman he loves. In the tally of romantic gestures, it seemed Alistair was soundly beating him even with a wife and potential child on the way. "The inability to have children," Cullen spoke up, a cruel part of his brain stripping away their momentary bonding, "is that why you ended things with Lana?"

  Sure enough, the king's sunny exterior crumbled, clouds blotting away the typical glimmer in his eyes. "I told her I did it because she shouldn't be thought of as some mistress -- to have that stigma follow her for the rest of her life. She's so much more than the blank blank of a man. She deserved so much more."

  Cullen caught the beginning and asked, "Why'd you really do it?"

  "Because..." The king of Ferelden, a man who had armies at his disposal and could easily ban Cullen from his home country with a wave of his hand, folded in on himself. Like a broken toy crumpled at the bottom of the stairs, he sighed, "I'm an idiot."

  Chapter Eleven

  Memory - Stirring the Pot

  9:39 Antiva - Rialto Bay

  At least she took the time to move the crates out of the way, Alistair thought while struggling to catch a breath. If not, he'd have been battered to the consistency of oatmeal from smuggled cargo smashing into his body after she repeatedly threw him through the air. He moved to wipe the sweat off his brow but found leather and grime stuck to his hand. The grip on his shield was worn almost to the point beyond repair, just like his body after too many years sitting idle on the throne. He thought he'd kept himself in some semblance of shape in between all the fancy pastries, fêtes, salons, and feasts, but she was proving that very wrong.

  "Again," Lanny called. She'd shaken off her mage robes for one of Isabela's frilly pirate shirts, a black corset cinching her up. To anyone passing, she looked just like any other sea dog working the decks instead of the mighty savior of the world. An occasional glint of gold shimmered in her shortened locs courtesy of Isabela and a few other pirate friends. When did she last cut her hair?

  Alistair waved his hand, "How's about we take a break? Maybe try and find wherever you threw my internal organs and stuff 'em back in?"

  Lanny pursed her lips, deflating those luscious temptations down to a thin line. No, he shook his head, that was not the thought to be having. It'd been eight years since the blight ended and through all that unending time he'd been able to keep himself in check. With Lanny running off to Amaranthine every time a darkspawn sneezed and Eamon skulking in the shadows ready to swoop in if Alistair so much as watched her walk away, it was easy. But here, far from his kingly duties and her from the wardens, with both of them back into the swing of things (her back in the swing of things, Alistair was struggling to not die) it grew harder to remember he wasn't supposed to be in love with her.

  "The antivan prison nearly did you in. If it weren't for Varric's crossbow..."

  "Bianca," he piped up.

  That caught her, the determination to torture him slipping away. Lanny crinkled her nose and asked, "Who names their crossbrow Bianca?"

  "Merchant dwarves that are good friends with pirate queens, apparently," Alistair said. Every bone in his body ached. They'd been holed up in the hold for what had to be hours with him waving his stick-sword, while she barely broke a sweat tossing him on his royal ass.

  Lanny shook her head again at the absurdity, those golden knots jangling together, then she snapped up, all merriment slipping away. "Right, come at me again."

  "How about we have a harshly worded debate instead?" Alistair sighed.

  "This was your idea," she crossed her arms, her staff knockin
g into the low ceiling.

  The practice sword, in reality a broken board borrowed for these purposes, nearly slipped out of his sweaty hand. He should have worn gloves, or at least real armor to try and cushion his fall. Maybe a big suit of pillows?

  "And you went along with it. One of my ideas. I don't know what you were thinking," he chided, still gasping for air.

  Lanny parted her hands and twisted her chin down, "I'm growing addled in my old age. You wanted to practice, and Maker knows you need it. So, let's practice."

  It'd seemed smart at the time. After slipping out of Antiva and barely any crows aware, with Isabela piloting the ship and Varric supervising, Alistair thought it best to dust off his old templar skills in case they had to fight Maker only knew. At least he hoped he'd be a bit more useful in a fight than before. But he forgot that sparring against Lanny was like running into a bear's den half naked and coated in honey.

  "Fine," Alistair rolled his shoulders forward to get into position.

  "Your arm's too high," Lanny gestured to his right hand waving around the threatening piece of wood.

  Alistair eyed up his weapon, then turned to her, "Since when do you know anything about swordplay?" he asked, but lowered his arm.

  Shrugging with a quirky smile, Lanny parted her hands. She didn't count for him, didn't wave her hands to say when to start, but he felt the mana twist in the air. The veil pulled apart fast from her machinations. Alistair lifted his shield to guard his face as he dipped into that hole inside him. It wasn't easy to explain to anyone. Lanny asked once, purely curious and not in any way planning some mage revolt against all templars. He'd said it was like covering the magic with a blanket to try and smother it away as one would a fire, but that wasn't it. Not really. There was reality and there was reality-reality. The hole ran deeper than that, a touch of pure realness that he'd use to choke away the veil. That was also why he never tried to explain it.